"The last time we looked at Silicon Valley's lobbying efforts, Google was the big spender and Apple the piker. That hasn't changed much in the past nine months. In fact, Google increased its political spending in 2012 - a Presidential election year - by nearly 90%, while Apple reduced its by 13%." Anti-SOPA or no, that's a hell of a lot of money. This should be illegal - it's thinly veiled corruption.

I'm of the mindset that elected officials should be listening to their electorate first and foremost, they shouldn't have any direct responsibilities or pressure from corporate lobbyists whom they're not supposed to be representing. Corporate lobbyists have essentially disconnected the government from it's legitimate constituents.

The way I feel it *should* work is that corporations should have to convince the public to pressure their representatives instead of taking the public out of the loop entirely as it is now. This would fix alot of problems with corporations getting disproportionate representation and entitlements without any public approval or oversight (DMCA, SOPA, etc). It would encourage more political involvement because the public's input would actually carry weight. Corruption is partly mitigated by shifting away from bribing individual politicians to bribing the entire public.

Ideally this could be done in such a way that expert panels be involved. Their work must be explicitly open for public review. Most importantly though, unlike today, experts should be employed/contracted independently by the government and definitely not be not be connected to sources of corruption such as lobbyists/corporate funding.